


Cheap Shot Music

by calmlikesurrender



Series: Started but don't plan on finishing. [2]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drinking, M/M, Masturbation, Smoking, there is porn watched, they're older
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-13
Updated: 2013-06-13
Packaged: 2017-12-14 20:30:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calmlikesurrender/pseuds/calmlikesurrender
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zayn and Harry are pathetic and nearly thirty and go to a hotel one night to avoid their neurotic boyfriends. Basically.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cheap Shot Music

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't even a story. I don't know what I'm doing.

Zayn and Harry have done this before. Just not for a long time.

 

Before one would call and they’d meet up. Probably end up screwing around. Back then it was easy. Liam wanted no strings. Louis didn’t care who Harry fucked so long as he came crawling back to him the next day.

 

Now it’s decidedly more complicated. Both of them clinging desperately to mid-twenties and the irritating defeat of long term relationships. Still doesn’t matter, though- they’re both hiding in a broken down motel.

 

            From Liam, who found a new grey hair. From Louis, who found a man’s sock wedged between his and Harry’s mattress and headboard.

 

            They start out on the sofa, but quickly end up on the floor in front of it instead, pushing the short table out a bit to accommodate their legs.

 

            It only takes a few seconds before Harry wiggles out of his sweats. Zayn chucks his shirt and shoes. He unzips his jeans and tugs a little past his hips, but doesn’t bother with anything more.

 

            Somehow they end up flipping through the channels, the grainy television set only scoping about a handful. It’s either a cooking competition, or the 500-something erotic channel and Harry decides for them. The first scene some burly man plowing into a girl who’s squealing in what Zayn’s eerily unconvinced is pleasure.

 

            Harry opens the first beer with his teeth, drinks half before he sets it down again.

 

            Zayn can feel his eyes on him. That mopey, determined look Harry or Niall always dig up when either one’s convinced Zayn’s in a funk. Louis and Liam are the only ones who ever understood that sometimes he just needed to sit in silence for a while.

 

            By now, the girl’s pig tails are gone and she’s straddling the man on a narrow twin bed decorated with neon pink hearts and roses. Obviously the bed of an adolescent girl with hopes of fucking her step father.

 

            A step father who is now grunting like a pig with the girl on top of him. When he eases her off, he stands by the bed and she looks up at him. Innocent eyes framed with enough make up to fuel a fire. Then he drops a plump hand on her shoulder and shoves her right down to her knees. A second later, she’s got his fat cock between her lips and Zayn’s so tired of forcing himself to stare at this. To do anything but meet Harry’s eyes.

 

            He shakes a cigarette from a pack and presses it between his lips, the sound of the girl slurping almost enough to make this seem less like torture. But then Harry sets the beer down and it clinks on the glass table and it sounds nothing like Liam’s knees hitting their bedroom floor, but then it sounds exactly like it and it won’t stop. The slurping, gagging, breathy little grunts from the man and Harry’s chest rising slow beside him. 

 

            Zayn’s twitching to make a fist and just pound it into something when he snorts, “I hate that shit. Liam always wants to get- get down on his knees for me. He drops. I don’t get it, but he looks so damn..,” scaly click-clicks of his lighter, “eager.”

 

            When his hair falls in his eyes, he doesn’t push it away. Lets the exhale muddy it up. Liam used to always tell him he liked it when he wore his hair down anyway. It’s hard to get a grip when you’re snapping at me not to fuck up your quiff, he’d say.

 

            Harry burps and puts his free hand on his stomach, starts to trail it lower almost automatically like it’s reflex. Tells Zayn Louis’ never begging to suck him off. But when he does, it’s literally ace. Nothing better.

 

            “But on his knees, though?”

 

            It hadn’t always been like that. When they were first fooling around, Liam had balked at anything that didn’t involve a standard bed and pillows and dimmed lights and Zayn taking his sweet time. Then somehow they were kissing at their dining room table, sucking marks together in the shower. A good hour or so on the couch with Zayn trying to convince Liam that fingering him open in the living room won’t make them self-combust.

 

            Then there’s now.

 

            Harry says he’ll take him any way Louis wants. On his knees. On his back. On his stomach. Against the counter- there’s a short pause for him to sip- or wherever. He’s not picky.

 

            “You really want him begging at your feet like that, though?” Zayn says. His mind immediately supplies him with the thought of Louis dropping to his knees, thin fingers curling into Zayn’s waist band, licking his lips, funky cheap shot music thumping from off-camera speakers.

 

            Harry takes the cigarette from Zayn’s fingers, breathes in deep. He smiles, eases out a huff of white air between words, “If that’s what he wants to do.”

 

            Zayn lights up another. “’Course. Forgot who I was talking to.”

 

            When Harry shrugs, Zayn whispers whipped under his breath.

 

            If Harry’d tried to object, Zayn would have shot off a list of reasons why it was true. Not that they didn’t both know how pathetically tied down they were. A million things lined up one after the other to pound the nails in harder.

 

            Harry’s latest is the rat’s nest on his head. Louis had said all of five words and Harry hadn’t brushed his hair since. It had started out as a bit of a joke, Zayn’s sure, but after a while, the others stopped mentioning it and Harry’s hair stayed in some twisted state between just woken up and being the sole survivor of a forest fire. It’s been knotted for weeks now. Bleached strips sagging out limp from his fringe. Louis calls him ‘Shaggy’. Harry had stopped pretending to hate it days ago.

 

            He clicks off the movie and silence slinks in around them again.

            “Speaking for everyone who’s ever watched porn in their entire life. ‘It’s sexy’,” Harry says. When he stretches his legs out, he nearly knocks over a bottle. Neither rushes to steady its clinking wobble on the table, “I have a theory.”

 

            Zayn’s bordering on tipsy, Harry’s lips raspberry red notches, everything else a blur. His voice is so deep, he whispers and it rattles between them. Zayn’s sure if he wasn’t so tired, he could probably get hard just from this. He makes himself look Harry in the eyes. “What?”

 

            “Maybe the tattoos are a front,” he whispers, rasps really.

 

            Zayn nods. “Uh huh.”

 

            “And deep down?”

 

            “Yeah.”

 

            “You’re really a prude.”        

 

            Even the gulps make him feel guilty now for hating something so absurdly. Or frustrated, more like.

 

            No, guilty. It’s hard to watch the dark brown glass and not suck down the taste of Liam those mornings after they get a little carried away. Hard not to find his worked out little moans in Harry’s heels sliding back against the carpet to tuck up under him.

 

            When he speaks, Zayn’s surprised by how rough his own voice sounds. “So not liking cheesy porn makes me a prude?”

 

            Then Harry’s phone starts to ring.

 

He shoves it down between the cushions, smothering ‘rocks and daggers’ to whimpers. Louis’ ringtone.

 

            Harry’s sipping between breaths, “So it’s bad, even when he’s into it. And getting off to cheesy porn makes me a pervert.”

 

            “No,” Zayn says, hand on a bottle. Harry’s or his, he doesn’t know. He traces his tongue across the rim and takes a sip. Cringes. Takes another. “Makes you a sadist.”

 

            They used to tease Harry mercilessly about this. How his face would screw up when he was confused.  Somehow it became the other boys teasing him while Louis made a point not to input. Either way, he’s making the same dreamy face now, chewing into his lip like a bit of blood and skin will help him wriggle out the answer.

 

            “Wait, sadist?” he asks, the blush on his cheeks dripping down his neck to fan out across his chest, drag the swallows out like fingertip bruises, “That’s- people who like bondage, right?”

 

            “No, it’s people who like people who like bondage. Or don’t.” 

 

The perplexed puppy squirms back. “That’s fucking confusing.”

 

This time it’s Zayn’s phone that’s ringing. They both stare down at it on the table, ‘can’t let you go’ blaring out like a siren in the silence.

 

When Harry reaches for it, Zayn doesn’t stop him.

 

“Hey- yeah, he’s not- Oh, alright.- Yeah.- Of course.”

 

Liam’s voice on the other line is just how Zayn left him. Panicking in the bathroom, raking through his beard for any other grey beacons. Zayn had reminded him until he felt hoarse. “Babe, you’re twenty-seven. Calm the fuck down.”

 

The thing is- Zayn doesn’t handle break downs.

 

Tears are the worst. They’re like grenades or something.

 

He’s only petting and coaxing someone for so long before he bolts. With Liam, he’d always been sickeningly patient, though. Maybe waiting two years for a first kiss had sucked it all out of him.

 

But every now and then Liam’s sporadic freak-outs made Zayn start to question all of those quick forever promises he’d been making recently. Most of the times, he didn’t even realize he was doing it. But scratching his nails across the little hairs at the top of Liam’s neck, making a joke about a twenty-fifth anniversary.

 

Being nineteen and scrawny and naked and joking in bed about a wedding ring. Terrifying. Absolutely terrifying in comparison to being twenty-eight and in nothing but boxers, wrapped around Liam’s long body, lips pressed to the mole on his neck, sucking down a stupid joke about not needing matching wedding bands. How Liam’s great aunt will be promptly scratched off of the guest list.

 

But no, Zayn’s not going to think about this because sulking was something poignantly guilty. And he’s going to get wasted. And stoned. Maybe end up fucking Harry. He’s not going to sulk. He’s too frustrated.

 

He convinces himself that the frustration with Liam is that it’s something so petty this time. No one ever dies from a grey hair. Zayn had found a little patch of them near his ear months ago. The next day he’d had their stylist take him silver at both temples.

 

When he’d suggested that Liam just shave his damn beard if it bothered him so much, it was like he’d told him to start a genocide. So he left and dialed Harry in the car. Made a quick stop at the closest mart for a few packs of cigarettes and dragged what was left of his stash from his glove box.

 

Harry’d shown up in nothing but sweats, cradling a litter of bottles in both arms, sneaking wide-eyed sweeps of the dim halls like a teenager out past curfew.

 

Five skips on Pandora and the cigarettes are gone. The beer down to tepid sips.

 

Harry empties out the hotels’ cheap mini bar and they chug without checking labels.

 

Zayn only stops when he starts to feel like there’s something pressing right up against the front of his skull, burning right in his brain.

 

Harry laughs and proudly declares him a lightweight.

 

He’s gagging into the balled up pile of his sweats a few minutes later.

 

The last bottle must taste like acid and bile, but Harry downs it and he’s smiling, a hand laid across his junk, the other in his hair. His head’s back and his neck’s a pale strip of ridges in the dark, his Adam’s apple jerking when he lets out a broken sort of laugh.

 

“Fuck,” hand gripping his cock now, jerking it a little, barely, “I’m warm, man.”

 

“You’re drunk.”

 

“You’re warm, too, right?”

 

Harry’s always had a way with words, Zayn thinks.

 

But then that just makes him think of Liam, too.

 

“I used to write poetry sometimes,” he says suddenly, watching Harry’s big hand speeding up a little now. He’s half hard himself. But any thoughts he’d had of even touching Harry tonight are starting to make him feel dirty, like he’s just flipping the bird right in Louis’ face.

 

“I never knew that.”

 

“Liam, too,” he hears himself saying, “He wrote me a song once.”

 

“Sing me some.”

 

“I don’t- know the words. Hard to get it together. It’s been a while.”

 

“How long’s a while?” Harry gasps out a little, left arm thrown across his eyes. He’s still smiling, stroking, tiny little thrusts of his hips into his fist.

 

Zayn counts with his fingers. Tries to remember the last time Liam took out his guitar.

 

“Seven years, I think.”

 

“Oh- Oh, that’s. Wow.”

 

Eventually even that mono-syllabic lull is too much and Zayn just leans back against the sofa and waits for him to finish.

 

Just like he remembers, it doesn’t take Harry long to get there. A few more clipped mouthfuls of air and a grunt or two. And, just like he remembers, Harry doesn’t attempt to clean up or anything. Only sits back covered in it, that same smile plastered on like a tattoo.

 

When Zayn finally asks if Louis had a reason to freak, if Harry was fooling around on him, Harry’s sticky pressed on smile inks down to his chest in a fiery red.

 

“He should trust me,” he says.

 

“So he’s nuts then?”

 

Little pause. Harry shifts his feet on the carpet.

 

“I was sixteen when we started fooling around,” he adds, “Louis had my whole life.”

 

I had Liam’s, Zayn starts to say. But it’s not the same. They both know. Liam never strayed. Probably never would. It was always Zayn who get distracted and forgot the words to songs and let himself get lost in someone else for a little while. Who had to pick up the pieces to old news and string them back together and make Liam’s sparkly little snow globe world remain stitched into the present like some dopey reality caricature. Here, this is me. Effortless.

 

There was never any room left for second guessing with Liam. With Louis, Zayn had no idea. If Harry was any indication, forever was scratched into the top layer of the tree bark with a pocket knife.

            Zayn phone’s ringing. “Hey, I’m going to sleep,” it’s like he can taste the back of his throat, scrape his tongue across his tonsils, “I’m lying down.”

            Harry nods. Starts to gather his things.

            Zayn almost wants to tell him to stay.

            But he’s falling asleep right there on the floor and Harry’s slipping into the sweats with the vomit near the groin and Zayn knows what it’s like. Or he knew. He knew what it was like to get frustrated and leave for a few hours, but to keep running back.

            Now, he’s not even sure he could find his way back if he wanted to. Maybe he’d get so far away, there wouldn’t be anything to come back to.

            Whatever, he’s fucking tired. Fucking wasted. Fucking pathetic and alone.


End file.
